Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The news of the day

End Notes


By JOHN REMBER

Eliot Spitzer is no longer the governor of New York. A woman formerly known as Ashley Youmans reportedly met him in a D.C. hotel for an hour for $4,300, a sum that makes you hope she donates a day's proceeds to Habitat for Humanity, and builds a family a home. Youmans has magazine and film offers approaching $5 million, so she could become to Habitat for Humanity what Bill Gates is to malaria.

In other financial news, collapse has been creeping up the chain of derivatives toward hard cash, which turns out to be based on the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. No news on whether Viagra works for Benjamin Franklin as well as it has for Eliot Spitzer.

Hillary Clinton was called a monster by Obama advisor Samantha Power, a scholar of the Rwanda genocide. Samantha resigned after Hillary threatened to come out from under the bed.

Geraldine Ferraro, Clinton advisor and former vice-presidential candidate, resigned after she said Obama wouldn't be a serious presidential contender if he weren't black. She is also rumored to have said David Paterson wouldn't be New York's new governor if he weren't blind.

Obama repudiated his church's pastor, who has said God is going to curse America for Hiroshima, for its continued support of corrupt and inhumane regimes and for turning a blind eye to Rwanda genocide. I would be more comfortable if it were God who had repudiated Obama's pastor.

A CDC study has revealed that one-fourth of the nation's teenage girls have an STD, mostly human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer. Its vaccine is considered too morally dangerous to become part of a public health campaign.

In a terrifying experiment to determine the critical mass of recessive genes, Ann Coulter is being squired around the nation's capital by columnist Robert Novak.

Diesel at the Chevron station in Stanley, Idaho, is $4.50 a gallon. Karl Rove was just paid $40,000 for a 45-minute speech at the University of Iowa, which works out to 8,888.8 gallons of Stanley Chevron diesel, or a Habitat for Humanity home, or a full nine-and-a-half hours of Ashley Youman's time—although I'm pretty sure she would charge extra if it were Karl.

The 4,000th U.S. soldier to die in Iraq hasn't died yet, but he's deployed there.

The Iraq war's final cost has been estimated at $3 trillion, maybe $5 trillion dollars—the value of the dollar being subject to fluctuation.

Oil economists are predicting that 2008 is the year when world oil production will start its long decline. With several hundred million Chinese driving around in new Buicks, the price of gasoline will approach that of fine wine. The good news is that drinking and driving will become drinking or driving.

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution and Oregon State University have called for reducing our civilization's carbon emissions to zero, lest the whole Earth warm by 15 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2300.

My financial advisor assured me yesterday that my 401(k) is balanced and adjusted to ride out the current slowdown/financial collapse.

"I won't go broke?" I asked.

"If you go broke," he said, "the foundations of this country will have self-destructed. You'll have other problems besides lack of money. Gasoline riots. Bodies in the streets. Gangs of 10-year-olds armed with assault rifles, killing people for the food stored in their basements.

"But not to worry. If your portfolio appreciates at historical minimums, you'll have three to five trillion dollars by the year 2300. And no heating bills."

Leonard Cohen, the Canadian songwriter who would have won the Nobel Prize if they had a category for Depressing Songs, is back on a world tour again, at age 73. He's going to play in mausoleums across Europe, backed by Keith Richards, who is also trying a comeback, even though he's been dead since 1999. The tour is expected to plunge the EU into a decade-long depression. My favorite first line of a Leonard Cohen song is, "In your suicide note you spelled forgiveness wrong."

Like millions of other husbands across America, I asked my wife if she knew what Ashley Youmans could possibly be doing that would be worth $4,300 an hour.

"Letting her husband win an argument," she said.

"But Eliot Spitzer wasn't married to Ashley."

"Then he's probably won the last argument of his life."




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